Leaving empty tombs behind

 ‘the women hurried away from the tomb, afraid yet filled with joy …..’ (Matthew 28:8)

Matthew 28:1-10 (Year A: Easter Sunday 16^rd April 2017)

It was early in the morning: cold and dark.  Something extraordinary awaited the two Mary’s. We need not bother or speculate too much about the details.  There was no CCTV to record exactly what happened or how. The accounts from the four gospels differ in detail but agree on the main facts.  What we know from the testimony of the disciples that first day of the week and later is that Jesus had risen from the dead and his body was no longer in the tomb where it had laid.

Easter presents a huge challenge to people today – at least those who consider these matters carefully and thoughtfully.  Modern-day rational and empirical ways of thinking and dealing with the world finds the Easter story puzzling. Even well regarded theologians and clerics find it hard to imagine a type of ‘bodily’ resurrection. Refuge is taken in the ‘spiritual’ message of Easter implying new life and hope relevant to people today and not in the ‘actually happened’ event of an empty tomb, clothes neatly tied together (hint for those in a hurry in the morning!) and a person who turns up like a ghost and yet can eat fish and bread.  All very fantastical and mythological, some will argue or suggest in the act of theological dodging.

Dismissing the Easter story as fanciful post-death imagination and handed-on story telling by the early Jesus movement is easy but based, ironically, on a particular mind-Set that deals in a limited set of empirical possibilities. 

That Jesus rose form the dead in all the meaning that this entails is a foundational principle of Christian faith and living.  Writing in a letter to the church in Corinth some decades after the death of Jesus, St Paul had the following very relevant things to say about Jesus rising from the dead:

But if it is preached that Christ has been raised from the dead, how can some of you say that there is no resurrection of the dead?  If there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised.  And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith.    More than that, we are then found to be false witnesses about God, for we have testified about God that he raised Christ from the dead. But he did not raise him if in fact the dead are not raised.    For if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised either.    And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins.    Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ are lost.   If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.(1 Cor 15:12-19)

The passage speaks for itself and does need commentary here.

And a very different type of story..

In short, if the resurrection is just a ‘story’ on the same level as a fairy-tale or a piece of fiction then we might hang up our boots, spend some time on a beach somewhere on Sunday mornings and find a life (not that Christians shouldn’t do such things as well on Sunday afternoons!).  Something happened on Easter Sunday that was so shocking, so profound and so capturing that the early eyewitnesses and disciples could only tell it the way they saw, heard and experienced it. Thus, Paul tells the brethren at Corinth:

 For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures,  that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures,  and that he appeared to Cephas, and then to the Twelve.  After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers and sisters at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles, and last of all he appeared to me also, as to one abnormally born.(1 Cor. 15:3-8).

A number of possible interpretations are on offer..

A number of possible understandings are possible including the following three (at least):

Uncritical realism – typified by a literalist, maximum reading of the resurrection narratives.  Some adherents of this approach insist on an objective approach that demands intellectual assent backed up – in case of any doubt – with historical ‘facts’.  Scripture is cited as in a law court and certainty with regard to ‘what really happened’ is part of the ‘faith once delivered to the saints’.  Moreover, great stress is placed on the physicality of the resurrection – not just spiritual rising but a resurrection of the ‘flesh’

Scepticism – typified by some strands of radical theology that sees in these narratives little or nothing more than the early Jesus movement trying to make sense of the experience of defeat, exclusion and new life in the immediate aftermath of the life and ministry of Jesus.  The notion of someone ‘coming back to life’ after death is excluded as impossible. Instead, the focus is on the meaning of resurrection as a story that inspires the followers of Jesus.

Critical realism – falls somewhere between the above two ‘extremes’.  Critical realism does not shy from the highly improbable ‘historicity’ of many of the details in the resurrection stories. However, it does not exclude the ‘realism’ of rising to new life which entails accepting the idea that ‘there are no bones around because the one who died is now risen’. This sounds like physical resuscitation. However, at this point the critical realist accepts that something extraordinary – supernatural – happened in the immediate aftermath of the death of Jesus.  These extraordinary happenings were witnessed by many people. Something ‘real’, ‘objective’ and ‘historical’ happened and that something ignited a revolution in the minds and spirits of the first disciples of Jesus.  Exactly, what happened and how it happened remains difficult to access and explain – especially at a distance of 2,000 years and the intervening world-view sea changes.  Put another way, we are not sure what a CCTV outside the tomb, at the time, would have picked up.  No Gospel account actually describes what happened during the key moment or moments.

The core issues

Adhering to both an objective and subjective view of the resurrection leaves the open the following points of doctrine and belief that are mutually compatible and reinforcing:

-          The impossibility of putting limits to the sovereignty of God and the world of rational, direct experience and observation.

-          The weight of tradition and wisdom of Christians down the ages who received the faith in the death and resurrection of Jesus.  

• The importance of rising from death in the challenge to change an unjust world
• The importance of hope in life beyond this present sometimes beautiful, if very incomplete, world and with that the promise of fellowship here and now remaining and transforming into eternity.

In the words of the Nicene Creed, we say I or we ‘look forward to’ or ‘hope’ or ‘expect’ (expecto).  Not that I (or you) have seen, touched, proved, observed or established scientifically – rather I have entrusted my limited understanding to a higher order of truth. The point is that our faith may be two millennia old but our thinking doesn’t have to be.

To put it another way, I (note personal pronoun) think that when the authors of the Gospel report an empty tomb there really was a tomb and it was empty not because the body was stolen or imagined away but because something very extraordinary happened that goes beyond human explaining or witness. Even if many of the details of the narrative remain of unknown historical fact, they point to a deeper historical witness – that of individuals and communities resurrected, risen and transformed that the world may believe that Jesus is truly risen.

More to the point – writing in Eastertide 2017 – such experience has profound significance.  What is even more important than the historical question of the resurrection (important in its own right) is the significance of that event today. Hence, it is more important to say (while still passing the lie detector!) that We believe that Christ is Risen than merely ‘Christ rose from the dead’.  Christ is truly risen in me, you, us – if our lives shout out new life, freedom for the captive and bread for the hungry. Otherwise, intellectual assent to an orthodox formula is pretty dead – in a tomb somewhere.

We may leave behind our empty tombs of dead religion, dead relationships and dead ideologies and embracing the one true living and risen Lord in my life, your life, our lives.

And so what for us now?

For people held in captivity and who have been suddenly released, freedom can be a daunting prospect. Adaptation takes time. Reconditioning may be necessary. This may be captured in a few lines of a poem by Gerald McFlynn.

On the morning of the third day I went to the tomb and rolled back the stone. Out came the poor and destitute, the prisoners, Travellers..the old and forgotten… blinking in the sunlight all ready for a new birth.

Therein lies a key to a living resurrection in today’s world.

Not what or how but so what.